Timing Your Messages

We send out Swim Smooth’s main swimming blog on a Friday lunch time (UK time). Why? We can see one reason if we look at a month’s web traffic to our website by the hour of the day (UK time) :

Note that this is just European visitors, where the majority of our sales occur. There’s two clear peaks there, from 11-1am and 7-9pm showing that these are classic times when people are actively looking at our site.

Obviously you want to reach as many people as you can with your materials so the idea is to send out your emails, blog, tweets, facebook posts etc just before viewing peak time. That way they will be higher up in people’s inbox’s or feeds. We normally aim for 12 noon with the blog (but actually looking at the data now I think 11am might be slightly better).

Why Friday? If you look at our visitors by the day of the week it’s obvious why we don’t aim for Saturday or Sunday:

We chose Friday because even though figures are slightly down on Wednesday, we’ve noticed our sales were always that bit higher on a Friday before the blog existed. Plus, I know from my own years in a corporate environment that the weekend wind-down starts at Friday lunchtime and there’s a bit of a feel-good-factor around most offices then. So if we repeatedly arrive in people inbox’s at that time then some of that might unconsciously rub off on us, Pavlov’s dog style. This seems to work as Swim Smooth followers often mention to us that when they receive our blog it starts to feel like the weekend!

One additional thought: Sunday evening is an interesting time when people seem to be catching up on email from the weekend, we do often see a little rush of sales around then. Well worth an experiment with and if you’re running a club or squad newsletter, that could be the perfect time to catch your membership and outline their training week ahead.

Web Analytics

If you don’t yet have statistics like this for your own website then you can probably use ours as a guide good – it won’t vary much from site to site especially if you’re in the health/fitness/sport/social sectors. Where do we get the data? We use good old Google Analytics – if you’re not up on web coding yourself, your web designer can easily install it for you and it’s free.

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